gamophyte on 14/8/2019 at 14:37
Quote Posted by DirkBogan
Thanks for you comments Tank_Abbott!
Regarding the plot, don't worry -- I intended the story to err on the side of implicit and unspoken, rather than spelling everything out in long readables. There are also many details I never fully decided on, to leave more for the player to interpret on their own.
The basic gist is:
City Hall was relocated to Navenvolk, at the expense of the whole local treasury. As a result, the town started becoming gentrified. Over the next few months, the local council of Navenvolk stirred up a panic about some unspecific incoming threat, and organised a forced evacuation of the upper classes (the 'compulsory egress' of the title). This was actually just a front for a mercenary group led by Captain Ricardo to come in and pillage the town with the council's consent. He was meant to funnel most of the nobles' valuables into the Treasury, and after making the town look like a siege had happened but been fought off, send word that it was safe for the evacuated nobles to return. He would be a decorated hero in return. The game takes place on day two of this charade, and the plan has already started falling apart. The details of this can mainly be found in
Ricardo's Journal and the High Reeve's Letter.Regardless, I'm glad you enjoying playing, and thanks for your kind words!
I put this together and I really liked it. It's not often a story sticks with me after I play. It can setup the next FM really well to, because if I were a noble I'd need to higher a certain thief to get revenge. Thanks again for this FM.
Melan on 14/8/2019 at 21:13
So this is the mission everybody has been raving about! And for a good reason, too - it would make an experienced author proud, and is all the more impressive for a first release. The really impressive thing to me is taking the Escher-inspired creepy/uneasy weirdness of The Sword, and realising it as a wild cityscape. Most of the spaces in town feel like they should not exist (they are either deliberately wrong or just oddly 'off'), and the way it uses atypical shapes is eye-opening. Wow! There is also a lot of impeccable detail that's hard not to appreciate. The interiors, object placement, home decor and uncomfortable refurbishments are mighty impressive. Small scenes with creative ideas everywhere. It all makes for a powerful mood, particularly with the well-chosen ambients. This town is both creepy and mysterious; it has its own character like Rocksbourg, Murkbell, or Sliptip's sunset streets. You could identify this mission from almost any random screenshot. And that's not to say the gameplay is lacking. On the contrary, there is a good balance of threat and exploration, and in particular, a lot of clever loot placement and good secrets. No arbitrary bullshit, but a lot of honest visual puzzles and carefully concealed paths. (I found the plaque, too.) You don't feel lost, just properly challenged.
After almost 20 years of playing what is surely more than a thousand fan missions, it is hard not to be jaded. Suprises are few and far between. And then in the span of a year, we get Whistling of the Gears for the 20AC contest, and Compulsory Egress - and they both knock my socks off. "How did they do it?" and "These guys are GUD" were the thoughts that came to my mind mot often. That's grand.
DirkBogan on 15/8/2019 at 01:22
Melan, you have made my day! Everyone has been wonderfully kind, but to have perhaps my single largest influence be so astonishingly laudatory is special indeed.
The extent of your praise deserves some response, because I would like to add some caveats and explanations — hopefully this will be helpful to others!
Firstly, I must reiterate that I am standing on the shoulders of giants. The interior design and object placement would be unremarkable without having pored over my favourites of the TDP20AC, which is why I felt obligated to give an explicit list of FMs/OMs I explored extensively in DromEd in the readme. There is one mission that you and others have cited that is missing: I was not really inspired by
The Sword at all. It wasn't my intention to make an overtly bizarre/surreal mission — compared to marbleman's excellent
(https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148939) Cracks In The Glass, with its
upside-down areas and Inception-esque architecture, I think my mission is basically vanilla.
I was going for an distinctive style with a creepy vibe, but I worry that some of the brushwork I consider more inept and amateurish is being mistaken for intentional weirdness. In other cases, I was limited by the engine: lots of the windows are at weird angles, not because I want them to be, but because all the brushes are rotated at 22.5 degree increments so that DromEd doesn't spit out a
remove_poly_edge error.
The unusual street layout is mainly a by-product of my design ethos: I decided to use the OldDark 'carving-out' technique, misunderstanding that the only real advantage to this method was reduced on-screen polys, and that it was often worse for the cell count. As a result, I had much less control over the appearance of larger terrain features, and simply had to embellish them with solid geometry. If you look at the eastern streets with the small bakery and grocery, you'll realise these walls are made from 8-sided cylinder brushes. If you remember the starting area from
Disorientation, the direct influence should be obvious.
I do like my choice of ambients, although I have big reservations about much of the technical aspects regarding sound (see above reply to Niborius for details). Roombrushing is a particular issue. I have ensured to the best of my ability that there isn't any sound-bleeding or intersecting rooms that shouldn't be, but this comes at a big cost on account of my inexperience and the asymmetry/non-cube airbrushes: there are myriad little gaps and overlapping brush centres which aren't
really noticeable to players, but are horrendously apparent to anybody who wants to 'Show Bad Rooms' in DromEd. Some rooms don't have sound propagating between them (e.g. through the Sandstone home window; or the attic of the mstn1128 house). This FM may have distinctive and impressive shapes and angles, but they come at the cost of perfect room-brushing. If only LGS had made more roombrush shapes available!
It's encouraging to see that you felt, "
there is a good balance of threat and exploration". Originally, all my testers noted that there weren't enough guards outside of City Hall, so you have them to thank for the balance of soldiers on the street. One tester recommended I add spiders or traps to the sewers and affordable housing areas — a good suggestion, but one that I vetoed, giving the following reasoning:
regarding the apartment/Keeper area: "this entire area is designed to not be dangerous (aside from the sleeping guard in the foyer). It is instead designed to constantly deter the player from exploring further, either with the threat of danger (creepy sounds, human remains, flashing lights and cacophonous machinery), or the implication that there's nothing to find anymore (the appearance of an abandoned Keeper chapel, including decommissioned broadhead traps on the floor and walls). I was inspired by the sewers in Disorientation, which only has one spider at the entrance.". To this end, your own work was very important.
I am quite happy with the gameplay in general. I have little experience in game-design, but I have thousands of hours of gameplay experience in Thief. I made a conscious effort to avoid all those things I find frustrating/boring/subpar in OMs/FMs -- long lockpicking, tiny hidden switches, cryptic puzzles, elaborate keyhunts, objects and loot hidden in illogical or deceptive places etc. Basically, anything that qualifies as busywork or repetitive. Most of the heavy lifting regarding the fun was done by LGS back in the late-90s, when they invented the core gameplay loops. I simply reused them in a way I thought was challenging and enjoyable, and subtracted the tropes I find outdated or dull. My advice to authors regarding gameplay is to focus more on polish and subtracting bloat, rather than trying to add really novel gameplay or complicated scenarios -- that is the purview of original works, not fan missions in a game with established rules.
Speaking of novelty, I am also pretty happy with my texture choices; I think those who consider stock resources to be ugly or boring at this point simply are not trying hard enough to make them look good in exciting or different ways. The majority of this FM uses a blend of Thief 1/2 textures, and textures that aren't stock, like the Undule/Unreal ones, have been used so often they are essentially FM stock. Yet, as you kindly said, "
You could identify this mission from almost any random screenshot". I didn't use any assets that haven't been used in other FMs before, although I did tweak and recombine stock assets. What I did do was spend lots of time re-aligning textures so they wrapped correctly around corners, and choosing them so that they matched the surrounding colours and materials — although, there are still dozens which are imperfect. Hopefully this serves as some inspiration to authors for the Thief 2 contest, where all Thief 1/2 resources are permitted, and proof that stock resources have so much potential when taken seriously!
I think maybe the only thing I'm unreservedly proud of are the little dioramas of in-game paintings, replicated using objects and brushes. It is perhaps the only truly unique idea!
Perhaps this text-dump is too much, but your comments warranted more than a simple 'thank you' — especially because you and so many others deserve their massive influence to be acknowledged. If your kind comparisons to FireMage, DrK, Purah and Sliptip are taken at face value, it is only because I have studied the works they made before me. Considering how many hours of glorious fun and wonder I've had playing your missions, especially masterworks like
Disorientation and
Rose Garden, I'm glad I was able to repay the debt somewhat!
Eiji on 17/8/2019 at 19:50
just a question....
I noticed the mission is compressed in "7z" format.... will the mission selector work?? or do I have to do some trick?
FenPhoenix on 17/8/2019 at 20:00
FMSel, NewDarkLoader, and AngelLoader all support .7z files, so just treat it as usual.
john9818a on 18/8/2019 at 10:45
I haven't finished this fm yet but I would like to say I am very impressed with it as a first release.
I noticed that the spotlights are suffering from the tail wagging effect. :)
DirkBogan on 18/8/2019 at 11:24
Thank you john9818a! I'm a big fan of your Love Story series; wonderful use of coloured light, and memorable architecture!
I'm not sure what you mean by 'tail wagging effect', however. If it's a mistake, I'd like to avoid it in the future!
john9818a on 18/8/2019 at 20:14
Thank you DirkBogan! :)
For some reason the spot lights appear to have a joint property which makes the bracket portion of the spot light move back and forth. I had the same problem with my gamesys files and I had to delete the property from each light fixture.
Nightwalker on 18/8/2019 at 21:13
I've just finished this and it is SO much fun! I'm short almost 3000 g. so I've probably missed a lot but that's a good reason to go back and play it again. There are so many nooks and crannies to explore and neat ways to get into areas which I love. Top notch! Thanks so much!
DirkBogan on 19/8/2019 at 00:21
@Nightwalker, thank you for your comments. Considering how many authors you've helped, and how many classics you've beta-tested over the years, I think you've had a bigger influence on me than you know! I know my own testers found whole new areas when they replayed, so I hope you'll enjoy replaying it sometime :D
@john9818a, for the life of me, I can't find any examples of this effect. In the gamesys, the only 'Lights' object with a Joints/JointState property is the ElecWallLight archetype (and presumably its children), but nothing I do to the settings of these properties changes how the bracket looks or behaves. I couldn't see it happen on any of the lights I checked either. Was there a particular location where you noticed this effect?